


To Play a Person

by wttlpwrites



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Recovering, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Sam Wilson Is a Good Bro, Steve Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers-centric, Wakanda, Wanda Maximoff is a Good Bro, angst with hopeful ending, but they’re working on it!, codependancy, sam wilson deserves better lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 07:02:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14255517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wttlpwrites/pseuds/wttlpwrites
Summary: He’d barely felt anything in months. In years, maybe. All he could feel was that vicious wanting, and a discomfort that extended to every single facet of his being. He hoped — god, he hoped — that it would change with Bucky. But some part of him, the deepest and largest part of him, knew that it would just be the same.Steve wondered how long he could survive, with just his anger and his selfishness and his wanting.(OR: a character study on our favorite sad centennial)





	To Play a Person

**Author's Note:**

> This has been in my WIPs for like a year now, so it's not quite Black Panther compliant. It's mostly a character study, a slightly darker take on Steve Rogers.
> 
> Thank you so much to [saveourtiredhearts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saveourtiredhearts/pseuds/saveourtiredhearts) for the beta! (mistakes are mine, because I can't keep myself from last-minute edits lol)

The tiles of the floor were a bright white. It was almost blinding. Steve looked down at them and scuffed his toe. His eyes traveled up slowly, and he saw Bucky’s feet kicking at the side of the examination table, saw Bucky looking at him from his perch on top of it. Bucky looked at him with something like pity, and scratched at his stubble with his one remaining hand.

They were a damned mess together. They were broken bones and mutilated hearts and Bucky -- Bucky always saw right through him. 

“You’re a damned selfish bastard,” Bucky said. Steve huffed out a laugh, a mean smirk on his face, not meeting Bucky’s eyes. He could feel Bucky’s eyes boring into him, glaring.

“No, you’re right,” Steve said, shaking his head. “Go ahead and blame me, freeze yourself, but you’re here. I’m here.”

“I ain’t mad you saved me, asshole.” 

Steve glared at him. “Then stop acting like it,” he said. 

Bucky glared right back. “Fuck you, Rogers.”

“Yeah, get over here and try, then,” Steve said, smiling. He didn’t have anything bright in his eyes. There was a gleam, sure, but nothing bright. 

Bucky gnashed his own teeth together and reached over to grasp Steve’s shirt in his hand, dragging him closer. He pressed their foreheads together roughly and closed his eyes. “Fuck you,” he said again, without the heat. 

“Bucky,” Steve said helplessly. His hands clenched in the air just beside Bucky’s waist, and Bucky buried his face in Steve’s neck. He closed his eyes and made his way up Steve’s throat to press a rough kiss against his lips.   
  
Steve moaned into it, and he’d gotten exactly what he wanted, and nobody ever saw through him like Bucky did.   
  
Bucky’s hand crept up from Steve’s shirt and wrapped itself slowly, surely, around Steve’s neck. Steve gasped into it, opened his mouth further for Bucky, felt the air struggling to reach his lungs, and he was 20 again, small and furious.   
  
Bucky loosened his grip, nipped at Steve’s lips, and pulled away. They stayed there for a moment, Bucky sitting on the table and Steve standing between his knees, and they rested against each other.   
  
“Selfish bastard,” Bucky said again. Steve laughed again, a gleam in his eyes. Nothing bright.   
  
“Wake me up when they’re sure I won’t fuckin’ kill you, okay?”  
  
Steve nodded sharply and pulled away, an angry smirk on his face. He didn’t look at Bucky, kept his eyes firmly to the side, and walked away.   
  
***  
  
Everybody always got it wrong. Steve may have been righteous but he was always, always filled with anger. There was no getting rid of that. It didn’t suddenly evaporate with the serum.   
  
Good got better and bad got worse.   
  
Bucky was just a little bit of both, and so things got a little bit better and, in some ways, a whole fuckin’ lot worse. They fit like wreckage, like debris, like the shards of a window that somebody’d thrown a baseball through.   
  
There was nothing in Steve that wasn’t waiting for Bucky, and there was nothing in Steve that deserved him. Except that—  
  
If Steve was selfish, Bucky was a possessive bastard. Bucky grabbed and didn’t let go. He had what he wanted, had Steve, and he fuckin’ knew it. Steve may have been selfish but Bucky didn’t need to be — Bucky already had him.   
  
Steve would wait, would find a cure, because he had forever, had nowhere to go, not til Bucky said he did. They fit like a bullet in the barrel. Bucky just had to aim and fire.   
  
***  
  
It was fucking wrong, that Bucky’d been used as a weapon. That was never how it was supposed to go. They’d just been biding their time in the war, til they could go back to Brooklyn and have everything where it should be. Steve had only ever joined up to follow Bucky and his draft notice. None of this was ever supposed to happen.  
  
It’d been wrong, when Steve said _it wasn’t you_ , and Bucky’d said _yeah_ , and Steve thought for just a moment it was gonna be easy, but Bucky’d said _But I did it_.   
  
“God dammit, Buck,” Steve had said, quiet. “You were aimed. You were fired. You were the gun. None of the rest of it matters.”   
  
“When have you ever let a guilty man go?” Bucky asked. He’d been quiet, solemn. His eyes were tired, and they hadn’t spoken to each other like this since before Bucky had left for war. This tiredness was not new; it was an old thing that they knew almost as well as they knew each other. It was as old as the fear that somebody might walk in on them, and the resignation when they looked at one another and saw no hope for change. No hope of ever waking up in a world that would accept them.  
  
“When he was you,” Steve answered. His eyes were hard and he couldn’t look. “And when he wasn’t guilty.”   
  
“It’s a nice thought, Stevie, but it’s fuckin’ self-serving.”   
  
“You’ve never had a problem with that before,” he’d said, bitter.   
  
“Now’s not before. Now is different, and we both know that you’ve only ever given a shit about yourself when it was for me, too. But you can’t do that anymore, pal,” Bucky had said, tired and harsh.   
  
“Who says?” Steve asked. He was angry and broken, and it made his edges sharper.   
  
But Bucky has been right. He was selfish, especially when it came to Bucky. That, it seemed, would never change.   
  
***

Steve had woken up in a world that accepted people like them. And he’d woken up alone. Sitting in his room, so graciously provided by the king, Steve browsed the internet. He’d found people like them, he’d even talked with some of them (under pseudonyms, of course), and what should have made him feel better about this new world only made him angrier.

Sam knocked on the open door, poking his head in. “Hey,” he said.

Steve looked up, saw Sam’s wide eyes and his skin, lit up by the Wakandan sun, and he smiled. “Hey, Sam. What’s up?”

“Just checking in,” Sam said. “You’ve been quiet since he went under.” He stepped inside, leaned himself against the wall, and crossed his arms. 

Steve sighed.  _ Play the game _ , he said to himself.  _ He deserves it. _

“I’m alright. I know I’ve been shitty recently. You deserve a whole lot more than what being my friend has given you.” And he truly meant it. He truly wanted Sam to have a better life than what he had now, living as a fugitive in Wakanda, cut off from the whole rest of his world.

Some part of Steve wished that he’d ignored Sam that morning in Washington, that he’d looked at this beautiful man and then kept on walking, letting the rising sun warm Sam to the conclusion that Captain America was just a fool who liked to run laps.

“You know that’s not why I’m asking,” Sam said, his eyes softening.

“I know,” Steve said.

***   
  
He’d gone into the army to fight for what was right, sure. But he’d also gone after Bucky, who’d been leaving, again. Bucky could move, could stretch the tether that the both of them felt, but Steve would always, always follow.    
  
It wasn’t that Bucky didn’t want him to follow. It wasn’t that Bucky was trying to leave, over and over. It wasn’t his fault.    
  
It wasn’t.   
  
***   
  
Steve was always so fuckin’ angry. He was getting through the days, Wakanda itself feeling like a time bomb, and he was angry. He was angry at Bucky, for freezing himself, and he was angry at Tony, for not getting it, and he was angry at himself. For everything. More than anything, though —   
  
More than anything, he wanted everything to be different. He wanted.    
  
Wanting was the most dangerous emotion in the fuckin’ world. It was viscous and uncaring, and it had teeth. It could eat you up, easy.    
  
He wanted Bucky to wake up. He wanted Tony to forgive him. He wanted to not be himself. And that wanting was turned into anger, bit by bit.    
  
Sam helped. He was always so helpful. Steve definitely didn’t deserve a friend like him, who thought he was good and worthy and would do his best to help Steve, even if it was with snippy bitching and sarcastic comments. But Steve was good at gaining friends like that.    
  
Steve was good at returning favors, at getting people’s trust. It wasn’t manipulation, he always swore to himself. But he knew that he didn’t care about Sam as much as he cared about Bucky. Didn’t care about anyone as much as he cared about Bucky. And because of that, he didn’t care about anyone as much as he cared about himself, and how he could get back to Bucky.    
  
But Sam seemed to get that. And it wasn’t like Steve was the most important person in Sam’s life, either.    
  
“I’ve got family, Steve,” he said one day, catching Steve sat in his room and watching some cooking show on Netflix.    
  
“I know,” Steve said and sighed. He couldn’t be angry at that. “I’ll talk to the king, see if he can negotiate with Tony. I never meant for you to get all caught up in this.”    
  
_ Didn’t you? _ Asked a voice in his head. It may have sounded like Bucky’s, sure, but only because it was truthful.    
  
“I know, Steve. Not your fault.” Sam sighed too, and sat down next to Steve on the bed.    
  
“Have I been a good friend?” Steve asked. He knew he hadn’t been. He ached with it.   
  
“As good as I expected, what with all your bullshit.”   
  
Steve sat quietly and wondered what that meant, and whether it changed anything.    
  
***   
  
Steve wondered how long he could survive, with just his anger and his selfishness and his wanting.    
  
***   
  
Two months in, the doctors that had put Bucky in cryo in the first place notified Steve of their apparent ability to unfuck Bucky’s brain.    
  
Therapy, they said, would help. They also said there was some corrective surgery that could be done, but that was only with his consent. Steve wondered if Wanda could help any, with her ability to wander through people’s thoughts and memories.    
  
“Can you?” he asked, two days before they were set to wake Bucky up.    
  
“Maybe,” she said, uncertain, and Steve thought for a second that she was just a child. He knew she was just a child.    
  
He knew he’d been robbed of being young, and that he was stealing her youth, too.    
  
“Don’t try, if it’s too much, okay?” he said. It was weak, and they both knew it.    
  
“Okay, Steve,” Wanda said. “For now, watch something with me?”    
  
“Sure,” Steve said, because he knew how to return favors.    
  
He sat with her, in a room with a TV, and tried to shut his brain off. Instead of off, though, it seemed to reverberate with all sorts of thoughts and feelings that he’d successfully not been having.    
  
He’d barely felt anything in months. In years, maybe. All he could feel was that vicious wanting, and a discomfort that extended to every single facet of his being.    
  
He hoped — god, he hoped — that it would change with Bucky. But some part of him, the deepest and largest part of him, knew that it would just be the same.    
  
He was a husk, and so when there was Bucky, there was nothing but Bucky. It wasn’t good, or healthy, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, really.    
  
He could fake it, his caring about things. And once Bucky was up and about, he could take their time together. Use it, to keep him up and awake and feeling. He could devour their seconds and minutes, make use of them like he could never use any other sort of time.   
  
It was seventy years in the ice, but even if he’d been out of the ocean he’d have been nothing but a husk.    
  
Not without Bucky.    
  
***   
  
Wakanda was filled with landscapes. Beautiful skies, beautiful nature, beautiful buildings so unlike anything he’d ever seen. In a lot of ways, it was like waking up in the new New York City all over again. Steve would sit, anywhere, and sketch the landscapes out. He would watch through the open walls of glass, pencil scratching across paper, and try his very hardest not to think.    
  
He knew he was probably not okay, not even with Bucky back. Obviously not with Bucky in cryo. When it came to Bucky, there was something that was wrong with Steve, that they’d never talked about, and it was dangerous.    
  
It wasn’t that they loved each other. That they’d known, they’d whispered into each other’s skin, they’d said the words and more. More than that, it was how they loved each other.    
  
They fucked and it was good, they kissed and it was great, and sometimes Bucky pressed his hand firmly against Steve’s throat, cutting off his air, and that was amazing. But—   
  
There was something dangerous in them. Steve knew it. The world knew it, the way it kept trying to pry them apart. He thought, he was almost  _ positive _ , that Bucky knew it too.    
  
Steve had to change. He knew that much. He knew that he would let down his team if Bucky came out of cryo the next day and he was even worse off than he was at the moment, if he revealed his wanting and his anger to be the only things that existed for him outside of Bucky. 

And he really did care about his team, in that muted way that his mind let him care about anything that wasn’t Bucky. So he couldn’t let them know that, besides Bucky, there was nothing to him. He would figure that out and fix it eventually, but until he could find himself in his mind -- he had to be buried somewhere underneath his longing -- until then, he would make sure they didn’t figure it out for themselves.

  
So it was while Steve was sitting on the ground of the castle — was it a castle? So far from everything he knew? — carefully drawing anything but Bucky, that Sam happened across him.    
  
“What are you drawing?” Sam asked. Steve knew this game.    
  
“The landscapes. Trees and moss and all this mist. It’s incredible, isn’t it?” He turned his eyes to Sam, made sure he smiled.    
  
Sam was looking out at all of it, too. He grinned faintly, and plopped down against the wall across from Steve. It reminded Steve of that first time they’d spoken, when Sam had leaned against the tree and Steve knew that Sam knew that some part of Steve was just playing a game.    
  
The game wasn’t intended to get Sam to do anything he didn’t want to do. All it was supposed to do was make Steve look like a person.    
  
“You doin’ alright?” Sam asked, looking at Steve intently.    
  
With a tight smile, Steve nodded slowly. “I’ll be better when you all get to go home.”    
  
And it was true. He didn’t want them to have to stay here for his own mistakes. His own missteps in the game. He was so fuckin’ good at playing a person, but when Bucky was involved (threatened) and Tony was being so obtuse, it was just...   
  
He got tired of playing. Sometimes.    
  
“Yeah, I’ll be better too, I think,” Sam said, a light smile still on his face. He tipped his head back against the glass, closing his eyes.    
  
“We did the right thing, right?” Sam asked. It was unexpected.    
  
“I think so. They had Wanda all locked up. That’s not part of the deal.” Steve paused. “They had you all locked up.”   
  
Sam nodded and opened one eye. “So, how about your boy?”    
  
“What about him?” Steve asked, returning his attention to the sketching.    
  
“It’s some pretty heavy shit, ain’t it?”    
  
Steve huffed out a laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”    
  
Sam narrowed his one open eye, and then closed it again and went back to resting against the wall.    
  
“You tried any of the actual Wakandan food?” He asked.    
  
Steve raised his eyebrows, putting on one of his smiles. “Yeah. A lot better than MRE’s, that’s for sure.”    
  
Sam groaned. “Don’t even remind me. C’mon, Cap, you can come make me lunch,” he said, hopping to his feet.    
  
Steve knew this game. He smiled, took Sam’s hand when it was offered to help him up, and made his way to the kitchen that T’Challa had said they could use. He made Sam lunch.    
  
***   
  
The next day, Steve woke up and everything felt real, the way it hadn’t in so long. He knew that things were going to change. Knew that nothing ever stayed constant.    
  
The only thing that had ever stayed constant was how he wanted, how he was nothing but that wanting, but he was going to change that. Soon.    
  
He swung his feet out of bed — and wasn’t it incredible, that it’d been decades and decades ago that he’d slept in his own bed? That he just took and took and took and took from everybody who offered, the army and the Senator and SHIELD and Tony and T’Challa? — and rubbed at his eyes. Checking the bedside clock, he watched as the numbers moved from 7:03 to 7:04 to 7:05.    
  
They were set to unfreeze Bucky at eleven.    
  
So Steve got up, and got dressed and washed his face, and went to find Wanda.    
  
Outside of her door, he knocked quietly, waiting for the okay.    
  
“Hey, Steve, just a second,” she said.    
  
“Sure, no problem,” he replied, leaning against the wall outside her door. He was waiting patiently when she opened up, and he gave her a light smile.    
  
“Jesus,” she said. “Give a girl some warning.”   
  
“What did I do?” Steve asked, a furrow above his brow. Wanda rolled her eyes.    
  
“Look at yourself, shirt too tight and leaning against my door. You could give somebody a heart attack like this.” Her slight accent floated over the space between them, and he loved this kid.    
  
“Not you. You’re like, twelve, and you’ve got that special someone waiting back home,” Steve said, smiling and following her as she made her way to the kitchen area.    
  
Wanda flicked an eyebrow at him, head turned to look back. “Oh? And I’m the only one?”   
  
Steve narrowed his eyes but couldn’t stop the smile. It was times like this that he didn’t mind the game.    
  
“So,” she said when she reached the kitchen counter that they all shared now. “Eleven.”   
  
And Steve went still. “Yeah.”    
  
He could feel himself growing tenser at the idea of Bucky, up and awake. The object of his wanting, right there in front of him, to touch and hold and love. The object of his wanting, making obsolete the need for wanting and making obsolete Steve himself.   
  
“You are more worried than you are anticipating.”    
  
Steve looked over where Wanda had her back turned, rummaging through the fridge. She was still in pajamas.    
  
“Wanda—“ he stopped. Sat himself down at one of the chairs at the table. “I’m different when he’s around.”   
  
She finally found what she was looking for and turned back around to look at him, yogurt in hand.    
  
“Different?” She asked. It wasn’t confusion, it was merely a prompt to keep talking.    
  
“You ever look in our heads? Just to see?” Steve asked. He didn’t know how to talk about what he wanted to prepare her for.    
  
He didn’t really know whether it mattered if he prepared them. If it was important enough to bother preparing them.    
  
“Never on purpose,” she said. She didn’t seem nervous or scared. She leaned back against the fridge and picked up a spoon from the sink to eat her yogurt.    
  
“I’m a bit of a mess,” he said. “But I think I’m worse when Bucky’s involved.”   
  
Wanda snorted, and Steve looked at her with a pout. “Hey, that’s not nice,” he muttered.    
  
“C’mon, Steve,” she said slyly. “You started a war for him. I think we know that you go a little crazy around the guy.”   
  
Steve blinked. That was fair.    
  
“I love him, so much,” he said, after a long pause. “I know he’s not bad for me. He’s never bad for me. But, I think...”   
  
Wanda looked at him with her big, sad eyes.    
  
Steve trailed off. He looked up with an empty smile. “I don’t know,” he said airily. “I guess we’ll see.”   
  
Wanda smiled too, thinly. “Yes. I guess we will.”   
  
***   
  
Seven turned to eight turned to nine turned to ten, and Steve was already pacing outside of the cryo room. Sam had joined him at some point, and the doctors were already in there setting everything up. Steve felt like the ground beneath him would crease if he walked any harder.    
  
“Steve, buddy,” Sam said from his place sitting against the wall. “You’re gonna wear the floor down.”   
  
Steve stopped but didn’t release the breath he was holding so tightly.    
  
“What’s goin’ on with you, man?” Sam asked after his initial prompt did nothing.    
  
“He’s a bastard,” Steve said tightly.    
  
Sam snorted. “Glad we can agree.”   
  
Steve shot him a glare, because he didn’t like anyone talking about Bucky like that, but Sam just rolled his eyes and looked at Steve expectantly.    
  
“I don’t know how to help him,” Steve admitted. It felt like a rock in his mouth.    
  
Sam nodded like he knew that was what it was. He probably had. “Maybe you don’t have to help him as much as you think you do,” he said. Steve looked at him blankly.    
  
“That’s what we do,” Steve said. Sam crinkled his nose and shook his head.    
  
“Aight, I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole.”   
  
Steve looked at Sam, eyes closed and sitting on the ground, and his breath hitched. “Sam,” he said, voice choked. Alarmed, Sam’s eyes popped back open.

“What’s wrong, Steve?” he asked, half making to stand up. Steve shrugged helplessly, and he ached. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, finally. Sam bunched his forehead in confusion.

“What for? Steve, man, are you okay?”

Steve closed his eyes tightly and grabbed his hair in his hands. There was something stuck in his throat, something that wasn’t anger or wanting, something that was just... there. 

“I don’t want to play anymore,” he said. He knew he wasn’t making any sense. He swallowed, harshly, and opened his eyes back up. He released his hair. Put on his face again.   
  
Just seconds later, a doctor was poking her head out of the door to the cryo room. “Captain Rogers, would you like to be present when he wakes?”   
  
Steve stopped and stared at her, blank look firmly on his face. People were going to see them, together.  _ People like them were accepted, here.  _ He looked over at where Sam was still sitting against the wall, shooting Steve a cautious look.    
  
“Uh. Um, yes, please,” he said, and made a jerky move forward.    
  
The doctor smiled lightly and opened the door wider, ushering him in.    
  
The inside of the room was a tightly controlled chaos, with doctors prepping the machines and adjusting temperatures, none of them rushing but all of them moving quickly. Steve stayed against the door, making sure he was out of the way.    
  
(Part of the game was being unobtrusive when it was called for. Made people more likely to let him in.)   
  
Soon, the head doctor called something in Wakandan and the others nodded calmly, slowing and then stopping in their work. The doctor who had brought Steve in looked back at him.    
  
“Are you ready?” She asked.    
  
“Yeah,” Steve said. He looked towards the tank, and took a deep breath. 

***

In the recovery room, all wrapped up in blankets, Bucky looked at Steve with concern. “Hey,” he said. He pulled Steve closer with his one good arm, pressed their foreheads together. “What’s goin’ on?”

They were a damned mess together. They were broken bones and mutilated hearts and Bucky -- Bucky always saw right through him. 

“Buck,” Steve said, choked. “I need help. I’m not okay.”

Bucky’s eyes widened. For just a moment, he let his shock show. Then he smiled, and there was something bright in his eyes. 

“Alright, Stevie,” he said. He wrapped his arm tighter around Steve, kissed at his jaw. “We can figure it out. It’s good to see you be selfish for once.”

**Author's Note:**

> leave a kudos if you're feelin frisky, and let me know what you thought in the comments! thank you for reading :)


End file.
